Large scale information technology (IT) operational environments are common in many different organizations, such as universities, telecommunications companies, professional organizations, and the like. Such large scale IT environments have many common attributes and are faced with many common issues in managing all of the IT resources. For example, large scale IP environments often include geographically distributed data centers, hundreds or thousands of physical servers from multiple vendors, numerous different operating system (OS) variants and versions, increasing use of virtualization to maximize infrastructure utilization and minimize cost, hundreds or thousands of commercial off the shelf (COTS) and custom application deployments. Moreover, IT professionals in such environments, along with the IT environment itself, are responsible for hundreds of mission critical business services, must rapidly set up, provision and tear down environments required to keep pace with business, and must address legacy infrastructure and applications inherited through acquisition.
In such an IT environment there are numerous common operational problems. For example, large numbers of applications and business services are deployed with complex or unknown interdependencies. Lack of visibility into current application topologies and dependencies prevents effective implementation of service impact management and service level management solutions for mission critical applications. Moreover, critical information about IT infrastructure and applications is historically maintained manually in multiple locations and formats by many different people and organizations. Implicit in this recognition is that critical knowledge about various applications, interdependencies, systems and the like is owned by people. Reductions in IT staff and off-shoring accelerates loss of knowledge about business critical applications and systems exposing companies to significant risk. Similarly, critical information required for operational support is not available, updated or otherwise accessible resulting in higher mean time to repair (MTTR) and cost to business. All of these difficulties are exaggerated by the high level of change in some environments making maintenance of current state of operational environment difficult to manage and costly.
It is with these and other issues in mind that various aspects of the present disclosure were developed.